Illustrated Life

“The Incredibles” and “The Big Red One.”

Meet Bob, Helen, Violet the teen-age grump, her younger brother Dash, and baby Jack Jack. These are the Parrs, their very name redolent of the decently average. They are the stars of “The Incredibles,” the latest offering from Pixar, which remains, at the time of writing, part of Disney. (A family that’s far less functional than the Parrs, by the way.) Unlike Pixar’s “Finding Nemo,” that backward blend of the scaly and the sentimental, the new movie, written and directed by Brad Bird, shares with the studio’s “Toy Story” and “Monsters, Inc.” a sprightly central conceit. Years ago, Bob and Helen Parr were superheroes—Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl. He was mostly knuckles and chin, whereas she was as limber as it is possible to be without consulting the Kama Sutra. Together, they competed to punish villainy, although, even then, you sensed that their supremacy might fade—hence the beautiful, end-of-day shot of Elastigirl cartwheeling away over the rooftops, her legs stretching like gum as she loops out of sight. Jump forward fifteen years and the pair of crime-fighters are happier, because they are married with children, but sadder, because they are surplus to civic requirements. Anti-hero litigation raised its head, the cops now handle crime, and, by government decree, Bob and Helen are forbidden to exercise their powers outside the home. He works in insurance, she raises the kids. So, how can they stay super?

As you might guess, there is a call to arms. A silvery seductress named Mirage summons Bob from retirement and flies him to a tropical isle, otherwise known as a trap. None of this is vouchsafed to Helen, who stays home in the blithe belief that Bob has been given a raise and a chance to take business trips. When the truth hits, she sets off on a dual mission to rescue and berate her lump of a husband, with the two older children stowing away for the ride. From here, we are treated to a flurry of inch-narrow escapes and explosions of gratifying flamboyance. What makes “The Incredibles” work, however, is not the velocity of the plotting, or the latest improvements in animation—these are so regularly cried up, with every Pixar release, that we greet them with yawns of contented acceptance—but the more prosaic fact that the folks at the movie’s heart are exaggerated way beyond our capacities but not quite beyond our imaginings. The title is unjust; these are the very slightly credibles.

Bob, for example, is the drone who dreams of higher things. Why else would he and his friend Lucius spend an evening sitting in a parked car, tuning in to police frequencies and listening for the sort of misdemeanors to which, in the old days, they might have put a halt? As for Helen, she builds into a bundle of housewifely frustration. Her offspring, likewise, may be freaks, but they are the right kind of freaks—Violet can vanish at will and grow an unbreakable force field around her person, which is pretty much what most girls in their early teens would pray for, while Dash, true to his name, wants to run and run. Only the baddie, the excitingly named Syndrome, disappoints; he’s nothing but a megalomaniac, when what we need here is minimanias—the fuzz and snag of ordinary feelings.

Nowhere do those feelings breed faster than in Bob’s insurance office: as bare and off-white as the inside of a new fridge, hushed but for the tapping of pencils and the sighs of claimants. The layout, in which our hero’s head pokes above an array of cubicled workspaces, was plainly pinched from “The Apartment,” in which Jack Lemmon, too, was swallowed by the bureaucratic rat-run. Billy Wilder nailed the sensations of office life once and for all in that film, and Brad Bird is right to pay homage. He has bothered to think through the impact of his outlandish designs, whereas one of the depressing things about a big summer hit like “Shrek 2” was that it nodded at other recent movies, and commercial fads, purely on the ground that they were recent and would thus grab a temporary laugh. The “Shrek” pictures, like “Shark Tale,” will date fast, eaten by the rust of their own cynicism, while “The Incredibles,” silly as it is, retains just enough innocence to suggest that it might hang around.

Not that we should jack the film up to a plane where it doesn’t belong; there is no moral sophistication here that can keep pace with the technical variety, largely because that technique itself—at Pixar, at DreamWorks animation, and in the hands of every director who is tempted to tamper digitally with live actors—is, by definition, unable to cope with spontaneity. The camera no longer catches a gesture, or a play of expression, on the wing; someone has to create a program for it and patch it into place. That is why Brad Bird and his team were wise not to attempt physically authentic humans. From “Toy Story” onward, it was evident that computer animation was itself a shiny new toy, perfect for plastic cowboys and space rangers but hopeless at Homo sapiens. When I first heard about “The Incredibles,” I dreaded the prospect of a hero who would, like every other digital man so far, resemble one of Barbie’s boyfriends. Imagine my relief when Bob, Helen, and the kids, for all the nicety of their emotions, turned out to be—if I can risk a word that may be taboo in Pixar land—cartoons. Long may it stay that way.

It is twenty-four years since “The Big Red One” was released, although to fans of the director, Samuel Fuller, a more fitting title would be “The Small Mangled One.” As with any movie from which chunks were sawed off, rumors—upgraded to myths—have circulated of an unflawed original. And lo, it comes. After much sleuthing and jigsaw work, headed by the film critic Richard Schickel, we get the finished article, forty-five minutes longer than the amputated version that we saw back in 1980. This is a major addition to the canon if you happen to believe, as many film buffs do, that Fuller, who died in 1997, is a hero among directors. “The Big Red One” was his grand finale, cherished in his mind for many years: the crowning of the violent, unembarrassable manner which he had refined since the nineteen-fifties, in such films as “Pickup on South Street” and “The Naked Kiss.” His eye was as much flashbulb as camera, scanning a low-lit world for a kind of dirty, tabloid poetry; he was the Weegee of cinema.

“The Big Red One” has lost none of its doggedness. We still follow the slog of Sergeant Possum (Lee Marvin) and four of his men (Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine, Bobby Di Cicco, and Kelly Ward), members of the 1st Infantry Division, from the shores of North Africa (where American troops capture a strip of beach from a detachment of Vichy French), to Sicily, to Omaha Beach on D Day, and, at last, to a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. Much of this is founded on Fuller’s own combat experience, although just because something is true does not automatically mean that it will strike us as real; indeed, there is a faintly fantastical air to the hermetic world of our five heroes, who survive each campaign not only intact but barely scraped by the presence of other troops, let alone by officers. In part, this was a question of budget, with Fuller lacking the funds for the movie he’d dreamed of, and you could argue that he made the best of a squashed job, ramming home his vision of a war conducted not by bands of brothers but by a gang of freelancers, shackled to themselves for want of a chain of command. The trouble with this defense is that we don’t turn to Fuller for character sketches—he relished the screwed-up and the beaten-up, but nobody milder—and that, after two and a half hours, we still have only the flimsiest grasp of Possum’s underlings. There is a famously wacky sequence, reeking of Joseph Heller, in which the men help to deliver a baby inside a tank on a blasted battlefield, but for me it was spoiled by Possum’s surprised reaction when one of his men claims to have medical training. I thought, This comes out now? After two years of fighting side by side?

Such quibbling will not trouble Fuller’s advocates, who warm to him less for his subtlety than for his abrasive energies, the speed with which people in his pictures are knocked sideways into terror and psychosis—wait for the guy who loses a testicle, which Possum finds and tosses away like a peach stone—and his administering of lyrical shock. (Years before “Reservoir Dogs” toyed with ear-slicing, “The Big Red One” introduced us to that delightful sport.) It may sound ungrateful, after the reconstructors’ majestic efforts, to admit to disappointment, but there is something about the plastic lighting and the swooping zooms of “The Big Red One,” plus its kitschy grabs at the surreal—the scene in a lunatic asylum, where German troops are billeted, manages to be at once implausible and offensive—that blocks any close engagement with the drama. That said, you must see this film for one unstoppable reason, and that is Lee Marvin. He is its cold core, believably weathered by years of attrition. A single closeup of those eyes is not just a calmative to his jittery subordinates but an ice-blue rebuke to the more rackety aggression of the man behind the camera. As for the morality of war, Marvin has it sewn up: “We don’t murder. We kill.” ♦

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